Go Bing Yourself
Like a fun house mirror, a search engine reflects a warped view of reality. Prospective employers (and dates) nonetheless use them to check you out, so the real test of a search engine is: How does it make you look?
Bing is supposed to improve results for common search categories, like health and travel. But what about in the category of [your name here]?
Does Bing make me look smarter, more accomplished, thinner, cuter or funnier than Google?
Does Bing make my butt look big?
For meteorologist Scott Sistek, Bing was an instant upgrade.
“I’m way ahead of the other Scott Sistek on Bing,” he said.
Sistek and his name-doppelganger are about neck and neck with Google, but on Bing the first thing that comes up is his KOMO bio. Sistek’s Facebook and LinkedIn are three and four; Bing likes social networking sites.
However, Sistek added, “Google does a better a job of finding interesting things to read about me.”
Everyone does it
I also found Google yielded results that were closer to the “real” me.
My Bing search yielded profiles from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and finally, a story I’d written for KOMO, and a blog post on KATU. It’s not very revealing, because I’m not on Facebook and my MySpace account is null.
With Google I got Wordpress, a LinkedIn entry that actually belongs to me, followed by the LinkedIn entry of other Amy Roes, and, via an aggregator, a link to a newspaper story I wrote.
Bing also seems to like Wikipedia more than Google does. Using a person I know as a test case, Bing returned a Wikipedia entry first. (Lest you be tempted, remember, you’re not supposed to write an entry on yourself.
This tool makes a side-by-side comparison easy.
Bing and purge
I’m not the only one for whom Bing is lacking in the self-image category. Some have found it dated while others have complained of a different image problem: photos.
I've been working in the media for more than a decade, so hundreds of my stories are probably online, if you can find them. With Bing news: Nada.
With Google news, all my KOMO stories come up, almost in chronological order, plus lots of earlier work. At least you can see what I’ve been up to.
One more thing: Bing is supposed to help answer people’s questions. But when I Binged how to use Bing, I got results on binging and purging. Uh, no thanks, I’m not bulimic.
If you can’t Bing ‘em…
You don’t know whether a potential employer/lover/business associate is going to Google you or Bing you, so unless until there's a clear winner, you’ve got to monitor both.
A Microsoft white paper on Bing concludes that SEO (search engine optimization) is pretty much the same, so job-seekers who have web sites won't really need to do anything different.
But Bing’s apparent preference for social networking sites means your Facebook or LinkedIn entry may well be the first thing someone sees if they’re searching for information about you. For people who are used to having lots of relevant search results returned through Google because they publish online, this reversal is kind of humbling.
The search patterns, they are a changin'. It costs nothing to switch to Bing, and lots of people appear to by trying it out. So if I want to stay on top of the search results heap, I may have do what I’ve been dreading for years: Get on Facebook.
Do you look better with Bing or Google? Tell us about it in the comments section.